


Semblance of Something Whole

by WolfAndHound_Archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Sex, Sirius in Azkaban
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 13:27:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5930116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfAndHound_Archivist/pseuds/WolfAndHound_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"On nights like this, when the window is open and the moon -- only a half-moon tonight -- rode high, the facade of Lunae slipped away, and shades of Remus just slipped through the cracks."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Semblance of Something Whole

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Lassenia, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Wolf and Hound](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Wolf_and_Hound), which was created to make stories posted to the Sirius_Black_and_Remus_Lupin Yahoo! mailing list easier to find. However, even though I still love the fandom, I am no longer active in it and do not have the time to maintain it. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in December 2015. I posted an announcement with Open Doors, but we may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on the [Wolf and Hound collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/wolfandhound/profile).

TITLE: Semblance of Something Whole

AUTHOR: Maple Tide

E-MAIL: mapletide@fastmail.fm

DISCLAIMER: The characters involved that are from the Harry Potter universe are the property of J. K. Rowling and all associated publishers (including Scholastic Press, Bloomsburg, and Raincoast). I'm just borrowing them for my own nefarious purposes. The plot involved, any stray characters that may crop up, and any other things that don't belong to her belong to me. I'm not seeking to make any money off of this; rather I'm going it for fun and for the chance to get it out of my own imagination before it drives me even more insane. Understood? =) Good.

RATING: NC-17

CATEGORY: Angst

KEYWORDS: Remus, memories

PAIRINGS: Remus/other, (post) Remus/Sirius

SPOILERS: PS/SS, PoA

ARCHIVE: Marauder Me. Wolf and Hound. Azkaban's Lair.

FEEDBACK: Please? I can be reached at mapletide@fastmail.fm

SUMMARY: "On nights like this, when the window is open and the moon -- only a half-moon tonight -- rode high, the facade of Lunae slipped away, and shades of Remus just slipped through the cracks."

AUTHOR'S NOTES: This story has been in progress for quite some time, and I finally managed to put it together enough to get it finished. It is definitely set in the universe of Moonlight & Shadow, and is definitely that era of missing time for Remus, and is set some time after Spanish Twilight.

**~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~**

It was the middle of the night, and the warm almost-summer air blew in through the window he had left open before falling asleep, even though it was more like true unconsciousness than actual sleep, but he accepted it, had accepted it for quite some time, as he truly had no choice.

After all, that was the only way he slept these days.

These days, they were harsh and rough, and he'd rather not think.

He had a room high above the street, and sometimes the sound of the people below filtered in. It was only a room, and nothing fancy. He had needed always and only the bare essentials, and remembered too clearly the days he had thought that love was all he needed to survive. He could breathe it like air, and it was the scent of long wild romps through the forest, mixed with cinnamon and the faintest trace of sex that never seemed to go away. He could taste it, and it was the only sustenance he ever needed. It was the only cloak that he ever needed, covering over all the imperfections.

Then the imperfections were all that remained of the "cloak"; it was patched and ragged in the wake of Sirius's betrayal of everything they had known. It was left torn so that it no longer protected him, leaving questions in their wake, particularly of how he could have been so deceived, even as the events of one night, where their flat nearly exploded before his eyes hovered at the back of his memory.

That was why he had left England, that which remained of his friends, and everything he had ever known.

His flight did not make it easier, and he still clung to that cloak - those memories - that slowly was replaced by another set of memories - another cloak - which left him feeling equally as shredded. They let the wind in; it was softer, but still harsh, and still touching upon all the imperfections as it rustled the sheets and pulled those cloaks - more figurative than actual - from his body as he slept.

For all that his sleep was an unconscious one, dreams still crept in of times gone by, and he came to remember how he had gained this secondary cloak, in this land, with a boy as foreign as the last he had taken over a night. When he had arrived here he had been taken in by an artist who had thought his body was artistry that must be committed to canvas forever. He accepted that, and went in with him, thinking that he could run from the memories, and from his own nature.

It lasted for a time, and he was able to bury his memories and shed that old cloak, becoming something new as he did so. This artist had not known what he was, and Remus sought to keep it from him. For once, he was loved without the other knowing truly what he was; he did not wish to enlighten him, and so kept his secret deep, directly alongside the reality that he would not - _could not_ \- love this French artist.

However, for a time, it had provided to be a pleasant existance, for all that it was a distraction.

In dream, he could not keep from remembering the night he allowed that pleasant distraction from supplanting the memories he so fled from, and tossed in the remembered pleasure even as he hid from the pain that the rest of his mind knew was coming, in time.

**~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~**

They were covered in paint.

Rene had found him in the empty city streets, and had declared him good enough to eat. Remus hadn't complained, hadn't even enough time to react as the older man pulled him by the hand and asked him to kneel. From deep within came a growl; this man - and the wolf residing within - knelt to no man.

_Except one, except one who was long gone and who he had tried to erase from his memory. He had failed, and he hadn't already always knelt, but it had all gone **wrong** , and so he no longer remembered._

But he held himself still, perfectly still, and there was a smile graced upon him.

Never would Rene allow him to see the final masterpiece.

This moment, now, later than that first night when he had asked in fluid, liquid tones if Remus would stay, was entirely different.

He was bound to the bed, and dark eyes appealed to him to stay. He was held bound more by the eyes than by the ties that held him so securely. It wasn't the scent of paint that clung to the air now, but something entirely different. Rene held something in his hand, and there was the slightest feeling of pain; the peculiar scent distracted him from that pain, but always, always the pain flowed over into a queer sense of pleasure. He leaned his head back, and drew in a sharp breath as the sensation expanded.

"Do not move," he was commanded in awkward English. "Do not, or you shall ruin the final result."

He pulled in a breath, and could almost feel a smile against his hipbone as the other man rubbed his cheek briefly against his growing erection. Remus hitched his hips upwards, only to receive a slap to the hipbone opposite, and a disapproving frown.

"You shall remain still. I am not yet finished."

Remus barely held back a growl; he had not asked for this bondage, after all.

The attention previously paid to his cock all but vanished as Rene bent again to his work. Remus knotted his hands in the ties and closed his eyes, waiting for it to be over. The first indication that it had occurred was the sound of the instrument Rene had held within his hands coming into contact with the floor, and the feeling of roughened lips pressing against his piece of work that had been done.

His eyes opened, and those eyes were dark with mischief, and glinting at him before biting into the skin. Again, Remus arched into the contact, but this time Rene did not still him or scold him for doing so. This time the artist took his hips in his hands and held them tight enough to bruise while he explored every inch of his cock with lips and tongue. From the onslaught of sensation, Remus found his eyes closing again, and this time, he left them that way.

Better this way. Better to be surprised.

His hands clenched in the bonds tighter still.

Just when he thought he'd go mad with the slow insistance of that mouth over him, just when he was about to do the last thing he ever would have thought of doing -- begging, he never begged anymore -- that mouth pulled away, and it was such a shock that his eyes flew open.

Still, the other man smiled.

That body moved upwards along his, the skin horribly sensitized where Rene had been working. There was a smile, a long kiss, and a murmur against his ear, "You are but my best, most favourite masterpiece."

With those words, he pulled away from his mouth, then bit down into his earlobe, just to see what sort of effect it would have. Remus twitched, his fingers not unlike claws digging into the bonds that held him there, and his eyes closed, his head tilted back. He waited, and wanted to be surprised.

He could nearly feel a breath upon sensitized lips, and when he moved his head upwards to take that mouth with his own, reasserting the control that had been wrenched from him so very violently, it was gone, instead tasting his throat. After that first touch, Remus moved his head, arched his neck toward this man who licked and nibbled along the angles presented to him.

This way, it was easy to forget who he was, to hide within this other identity that he created for himself. With every bite - _harder_ \- and every lick to soothe the ache left behind, Remus Lupin became more distant. He did not want to be soothed, he wanted the pain to remind him of times that became more ellusive the farther he was driven toward the edge. Nipples bitten and licked until they stood erect, before the bites became more intense and more frequent.

There was the brush of a nose, long and elegant, against one of the older scars, and he shivered at the sensation. He could do nothing, he could not force the man's head downward, down to where his cock throbbed and ached for release. The name of the Other was in the back of his mind, as part of Remus remembered all too clearly being teased, but never like this. A teasing lick against a hipbone, and he was arching upwards, once again forgetting that which he wished not to remember.

A hand wrapped around the base of his length, even as a teasing tongue licked and sucked along the tip of him. He growled, low and almost desperate. Before he could thrust upwards, that humid heat was gone, as was the pressure around him. Rene nosed and sucked, taking one of his balls into that mouth, where Remus' cock had so recently been. This time - **this** time - he was able to arch upwards, only to be rewarded by the other man pulling away, chuckling against his skin, and murmuring something to him in French.

Remus' grasp of the language was too far gone - **he** was too far gone - to understand it as more than soothing sound in the background. Then those lips were on his cock again, that hand wrapped around the base of him, and he was staying this time, sucking and moving on him in a faster rhythm. It seemed to him that only moments had passed before he was moving to the rhythm created, silently urging Rene to move harder and faster.

Then there was a probing sensation, a slickness, and a burst of pleasure that sent him over the edge finally, arching in his bonds, and biting down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood simply to prevent him from calling a name he had promised himself he would not remember. Only after he recovered, after he felt the bonds loosen and the other man licking the blood away did he open his eyes and murmur Rene's name before reaching one exhausted arm up to pull him down for a kiss.

"Merci," he breathed. "Merci."

"You are welcome, my own."

The words caused Remus to tense. The last two words struck him hard; in those words he recognised untruth. None could call him "my own" except himself; the last who had that privilege had abused it, had left him shattered and broken, had murdered their friends, abandoned him to everyone's suspicion, and been incarcerated in Azkaban forever. Never would he escape, and never would he have to worry again about that betrayal.

Rene recognised the tension in his body, but Remus moved against him, rolled the other man beneath him, and granted him the rarest of expressions in this times: a smile.

"You are not yet finished, oui? We must do something about that."

Sometimes sex did solve things.

Then again, even when it solved nothing, sometimes it can prove to be the world's best method of distraction. So it was, that night, for both of them.

**~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~**

The memory faded slowly, as the dream slipped into nothingness; dark dreamless sleep was more a comfort to Remus, as his memories would play out through dreams, and he had no wish to seek them out. The longer this dreamless sleep lasted, though, the more restlessly he slept. Eventually, the sheet shifted low enough so that it merely slung across one hip revealing a lifetime's worth of scars. His back was to the window, the same back that had held him upright through the hard and harsh years, and allowed him to face the injustice and prejudice that came with knowing what his true nature was; not all the scars upon him were visible, but an arch from neck to shoulder was burned into his very skin.

It was that one they always saw, and when they saw, they fled. Or he did, before they had the chance. It had been like that in Spain, although he had been lulled into complacency, so that his French artist - his Rene - discovered his secret, discovered what he was, and fled almost screaming into the night.

That was a long time ago, and he had stayed in this place since. After the pain had faded, he had discovered that truly, he liked it that way. The solitude was peaceful.

Except for the nights when he remembered the only one who had known his true nature and had not run. The one with the eyes like stars and hair like the night sky, shielding them both from the cruelty of the world as he muttered things that closed out the world even further. Yet, hadn't he run as well, too, in the end, despite all his promises that he would stay through the end of the world and beyond.

Only it had all shattered and the world had been left changed by it all. So maybe the world had ended, after all, only they hadn't been all left standing.

Yet, still he dreamed. The bond had been broken and gone for months, and still he could see, and hear that voice that he couldn't exorcise from his mind. It was like the ghost of things that had been was determined to haunt him for the remainder of his days. So he could run from the responsibility of being Lunae even while wearing the persona like another cloak that would provide a buffer of sorts from that harsh wind.

Except for nights like this.

On nights like this, when the window is open and the moon -- only a half-moon tonight -- rode high, the facade of Lunae slipped away, and shades of Remus just slipped through the cracks. The cracks that he slipped through were the dreams, and the memories that rose so high and vivid that he wished only to escape from this, but there was no escape.

It was then that the dream cycle broke and Remus Lupin awoke. He closed his eyes as it seemed that not enough time had passed since the last time he could have been said to actually be aware of himself rather than the facade he wore. The screams of anguish still rang through his head, and the proclaimations of innocence that he wanted to believe in so badly still remained in an echo.

Remus speared his hands through his thick hair and held his pounding head for a moment. It was always there when he awoke, these days. A headache like the worst of hangovers accompanied by a sense of something that should be there being long since missing and dead. He let out a low growl and removed his hands from his head since that never helped at all. With a kick, the sheets fell away and he rose from the bed.

The balcony called him, and in the early morning, no one would catch him in his nakedness, so he wandered out and leaned against the metal railing, enjoying the cool breeze that drifted over him. He closed his eyes and tried to close off the pain while at the same time trying to look at it objectively, analytically, and decipher exactly what this pain was, and whether there was a cure for it.

After several moments he sighed and reopened his eyes. It was as though someone had taken a vital piece of himself away and left nothing but the gaping hole behind. Yet, it was something that couldn't be seen from the outside. From the outside, he looked whole, sane, completely in control, as he chatted in the local dialect with the people on the street who were entirely friendly, but not enough.

He had gotten enough practice chatting with Hope in French when they had all still been in school to carry it off. He smiled at the memory; they had driven all the rest of them nutters when they couldn't understand a word, and Hope's girlfriend had once called it a secret code that no one but the extra-special could crack. That was it, though. It didn't take a great deal to crack that code, just the time to learn the language.

Sirius had done that.

The previously dull ache flared at the thought, but for the first time in years, he stood there and faced that pain. The pain that came from knowing a person inside and out, then discovering that you'd never really known them at all. Another sigh escaped from his lips; for most of his life, most of being Remus meant that somewhere, whether in the forefront or the background, there was Sirius Black, and now that Sirius had done the unspeakable, he had to discover who Remus Lupin was without him.

It wasn't the easiest of tasks, and not one that he was up to most of the time, although he had discovered a few things. He was quieter, more contemplative than he had ever been while in school. Sometimes, sometimes he went into libraries for the sole purpose of devouring the books that lie within. And while wouldn't deny that his solitude quite often brought him more loneliness than he sometimes would have liked to have dealt with, it was something that he was comfortable with.

After all this time, he was finally comfortable with his pain. With the emptiness, with the loneliness.

And yet, there were times...

He propped one hip up on the balcony, and waited for the pain to recede. While he waited, he watched the people walk by, indulging in their daily routine, and recognised that he would have to go for work soon. Food was running low, even if this place had been left entirely to him. Finally it was that, the reason and rationality that brought him back to his senses; the pain receded back into the back of his heart where it belonged, far enough distant so that he could function, and go about his everyday life.

"I'm not doing this anymore," he told himself there, that morning, as he did every time the pain resurfaced. No more faceless Spaniard muggle bullfighters, and no more French artists like Rene had been. No more of any other nationality that he could stumble across in his flight from the pain. Perhaps it was finally time to face it, to deal with it as much was possible, and put together the shards enough so that he might move onward with his life. There was no recapturing seventeen, after all.

Remus spent another long moment staring out over the horizon, and the view of something caught his eye. A tawny owl made itself directly toward him. It landed on the railing of the balcony, and Remus smiled; of all the animals that could have fled from the likes of him, the owls never had, particularly not those that had been trained by Hogwarts staff. He turned to make his way inside, and the owl flew after him. He retrieved something to feed the owl, as it had been through quite a trek, and took the parchment from its leg.

He sat down in one of the chairs in the small kitchen before unfolding it, and nearly jolted in his surprise, the pain that he had so recently tucked away coming to life again. It was a note from Hagrid, and in it was the reminder of how much time had passed. Harry was finishing his first year and - much to Remus' dismay - had already had a run-in with the Dark Lord. He was just trying to get together some pictures for the boy who had never known his parents.

_Or his godfather,_ Remus thought to himself before he could stop the thought.

He rose from the table, and crossed to the bed that he had so recently vacated to retrieve his wand. Then he summoned from the closet the box of old pictures, and reached for parchment, indicating to Hagrid that he did have a few that he could contribute to the cause. The years seemed to drain away, reenmeshing him in the pain as he flipped through the pictures.

James and Lily dancing outside school during the first snow of their seventh year was the first that he pulled out. He moved past a photo of himself and Sirius in the common room shortly after he had forgiven the other boy. There were others, some where Lily was just sleeping or James was twirling his wand between his fingers while everyone else studied. Then there were the wedding pictures, and those went into the pile en masse.

The boy had a right to know that his parents had been happy.

Remus' fingers stilled over one picture. James was beaming, Lily was laughing, and Sirius was leaning in to whisper something in his ear, unaware that Peter and Remus had been creeping up with cameras to snap a single picture of that. They had made copies and sent it to all their friends, most of whom had not survived the war. Remus wasn't certain for a moment that Harry should see that, should see that betrayal.

He wouldn't know that it was a betrayal, though. He shouldn't, unless someone had let loose the secret that his godfather had been the one to betray them all.

After a moment, he shook his head of the memory, and added one last picture to the collection he had gathered. He summoned his quill and wrote a quick note to Hagrid before enfolding the photos he had seen into the letter. Only then did he return to the owl and attach the letter to her leg. She nipped him on the hand, and in a flurry of feathers, flew away from the room.

Remus sighed and watched her go for a long moment before turning back and trying to reassemble the pieces of his life into a semblance of something whole.

**~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~** ~ **~**

-end-


End file.
